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GUITAR WAR NEWS
Volume 40 4/7/03

CURRENT EVENTS

"New Feature: Guitar War Tricks"

At the suggestion of Guitar War's theJonezter,
Guitar War News will now be including a column
entitled "Guitar War Tricks" where members will be
able to submit various "tricks," whether they be
licks, mixing tips, recording tips, mastering
tips, etc., that will be published in the next
week's newsletter. He will be writing a number of
these to start, but eventually we will be taking
submissions from guitar war members, so if you're
interested in contributing, reply to this e-mail
to ask how to go about submitting a "trick."
-Zarathustra

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GUITAR WAR TRICKS

Making your rhythm tracks sound "huge" with one
pass:

Olive made this request and I thought it was a
good idea to post as a tip. How do you make your
rhythm tracks sound huge, or wide, or full? Well,
there's a fairly simple answer to this and more
than one answer. Panning and layering.
Panning is something you need to be careful with
since you can make the song too wide sounding and
take away from the whole picture as I did in my
recent song "Becker Tribute". I panned the lead
guitars 100% to each side and it kind of took
away from the whole mix. Panning to about 75%
will give each side a small amount of signal to
the other side giving a much clearer sound. Use
headphones when you are mixing stuff down and
listen to how "distant" the instrument you are
monitoring sounds and it should give you a good
idea on how it's going to sound in the mix on
regular speakers.
Layering tracks can be tedious and time
consuming. Most people will record several rhythm
tracks and try to make it sound full using that
method. You can however get the same effect with
only one rhythm track in stereo. Most of my
rhythm tracks are just one guitar in stereo
unless I am doing some kind of harmony. Here's
what I do:
Using Cool Edit Pro, I record one rhythm track
onto 2 separate tracks. I then pan those tracks
one to about 75% left and the other to about 75%
right. Now I have the stereo effect, but both
guitars are playing the same thing, so it still
sounds like one guitar playing in stereo. What I
do to solve this is zoom into the 2 tracks and
slide one track about .02 seconds from the other
track. This is basically what a chorus effect
does to your signal. Doing it this way will give
the track a dual guitar sound and sound much
fuller than just using chorus or flange on the
track.
One little trick though, is if you decide to
record 2 sets of stereo rhythm guitars, adjust
the first tracks left pan and the other tracks
right pan. When you adjust each pan, it sends the
signal to the left or right in the pan. So
adjusting the second track oppositely will even
out the mix.
Experiment with it and see how it sounds!
-TheJonezter
http://www.thejonezter.com

INTERVIEWS

A.K.A Capn Zilog
RANK: Competitor

GW: Why did you start playing?
Capn Zilog: It's the well-rounded person thing.
My folks thought I should take up an instrument
in elementary school, and asked me what I'd
prefer. Guitar is cheaper than a harpsichord,
quiter than drums and less annoying than banjo,
so they got me a kid's classical and packed me
off to lessons.

GW: How old were you?
Capn Zilog : I was 12. Didn't enjoy my teacher,
though- after several months of lessons I put the
guitar down and only dabbled with it until I was
15. By that time I'd discovered Led Zeppelin.
That said, I was introduced to reading music and
fingerstyle, and that's not a bad thing.

GW: What are some of the milestones in your
development as a player ?
Capn Zilog: Clearly it was the day I put all the
pieces together and decided to map out
pentatonic, and later the natural minor, scale
over the entire fretboard and memorize it. There
was almost no rock instructional material at that
time, and music mags were mostly posing questions
like "So what kind of cornflakes do you eat for
breakfast?" At the time, I had no certainty that
any of this effort would pay off in a practical
sense. My hometown was a musical vacuum, and
reinventing wheels was the order of the day. The
other most useful things I picked up along the
way were harmonizing, three-note-per-string
fingerings and economy picking.

GW: What were some of the hardest things for you
when you first started?
Capn Zilog: Definitely memorizing my first
scales above. That's a lot information to attack
at once, and one thing I did was to put little
sticky-dot markers on the fretboard to help make
it visual. When I eventually took the markers
off, that was tough. Those dots were my training
wheels. Much later I took a sequence of music
theory classes in college. That was a real
challenge, because lots of these kids had already
gone through the whole high school jazz band
thing so for them it was second nature. Quick,
2nd inversion Emi7! If you had to think, you were
way behind.

GW: what is the most memorable moment in guitar
history for you?
Capn Zilog: God, there's so many- on the down
side, it was the loss of Randy Rhoads and SRV. On
the plus side, it was touring Criteria Studios in
Miami when Yngwie was recording "Inspiration,"
and sitting at Cozy's drum kit. Little did I know
that he a few years he would be gone too.

GW: Who did look up to then... And who do you
look up to now?
Capn Zilog: If you've heard Van Halen, Yngwie
and Stevie Ray Vaughan then you've already heard
the most genre-defining guitar voices since
Hendrix. Everyone else, hard-rock wise, can be
fitted into a subcategory of those three. I don't
want to diminish all the other great players out
there, but those players are like the primary
colors of modern guitar.

GW: How do you get your inspiration?
Capn Zilog: I think I rely less on other players
than I used to, which is a good thing. There
really aren't many bands that float my boat
anymore, and the Olympic extremes to which
"shred" has been taken makes that a musical
dead end. I just want to work on my songwriting,
and try to make my home-recorded pieces sound as
good as Tom Scholz did with Boston back in
1976. I'm not there yet, and it drives me nuts.

GW: What are some things you would tell anyone
who is interested in learning to play the
guitar?
Capn Zilog: Record yourself. Start with
something simple, like a Pandora PX4 so you can
have the basic experience of jamming along to
tracks with a metronome and hearing the result.
Nothing forces you to improve like hearing
your own cringifying performances played back!

GW: What equipment do you own now?
Capn Zilog : I've gone through a lot of gear,
but we're living in great times today and it
doesn't take much. A POD, a MIDI drumset, a
guitar synth and a PC running SONAR. That's
pretty much my current setup, along with my
purple Ibanez S-550 guitar.

GW: What kind of music are you listening to at
the moment?
Capn Zilog: Mostly DVD's, I'd say. There's a lot
of new releases from bands you could never see
before, such as Stratovarius, Emperor and Alice
Cooper's excellent "Brutal Planet." But for the
most part, I go back to my old favorite artists
over and over- the ones that everyone's familiar
with from about 1975-1985. I buy a lot of
Japanese imports, many just to keep up with the
state-of-the-art (Francesco Ferrerri's
"Suspension" is so over the top, I can't listen
to it for more than 10 minutes).

GW: How do you go about recording a song once
it's written?
Capn Zilog: That's tough, because they're usually
things that evolved in the studio. I rarely, if
ever, have a complete song all planned out before
hitting Record. Usually I'll have an idea or two
and use Cakewalk as a musical sketchpad with
which to experiment.

GW: How has Guitarwar helped your guitar playing?
Capn Zilog: I think many of the articles in
"Guitar School" are great. The biggest motivator,
I think, is simply reading advice from folks who
have already mastered the impossible, and are
accessible to boot. You don't need to be on a
major label to be a major player.

GW: If you can summarize how music has changed
your life in one word, say it:
Capn Zilog : Sanity. I need it to balance out the
technical half of my brain, and for the emotional
release. There's truth in music.

GW: what are your thoughts on the 500 club?
Capn Zilog: Isn't that a religious show on
late-night TV? Whoops, that's the 700 Club. I'm a
little concerned that the ratings system could be
gamed by determined people. For example, if two
guys of equal ability were to agree to only
compete with each other, after enough entries
they'd both be guaranteed membership. Same goes
for the Collab Wars. But I do like the concept
that votes by the most experienced people carry
extra weight, there's something to be said for
that.
-ms_badly_behaved

Want to write for the Guitar War Newsletter? Got
a hot product you want to review? Want to tell
the world how awesome a newsletter this is? Then
drop a line to [email-masked]. We're
looking for submissions, opinions, feedback, and
anything else you think we might need. Send an
e-mail to [email-masked]

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